“ It must have been your coming, Sir Romney. We hoped to see you last night—"
There was a blithe richness of vitality, a sparkle that made him remember the wine at Longstruth's, the Chinese girls twanging the vina in the bamboo clumps by the river.... Wine and song at Longstruth's, and a score of other thoughts, light and indistinct as the trailing movements of a vagary—with this concrete enormity in the room.
Romney suddenly whipped in closer to reality. His mind had been trying to hold off the truth from itself. Moira Kelvin turned to her mirror. ”

“ Remember this—there is no such thing as the triangle among real people. Mark the woman as common-minded who is in doubt between two men whom she knows well. All shuffling and experimenting is the cause of misery in the world. The higher the soul of a man or woman, the more essential is the voice, the hand of one. Any key will fit common locks. As for you—you were held in your work. All the natural fury of you was compressed in the gray and the silence of mere men-things. You were like a sleeping prince, Sir Romney. ”

“ I don't know why men should love the past. Each day is enough conquest for me. I can face anything in the morning—except yesterday. Until noon I am brave, and feel that I can take what is to come from ahead; but I cannot turn back. The moon is dead. The Gobi is dead. I don't care for the cleanness of death. The death ahead for you and for me and for all—that's not so hard to face, but it seems to me sometimes that we are the products of many deaths and I dare not think of that.... How strange our talk! And you should rest from your journey. ”

“ For many hours they sat together on the mud-floor of the clay-walled and palm-thatched hut in Wampli. Rajananda lay covered in his yellow robe and listened, marking the symbols of God and the Holy Breath upon the dirt of the floor with a finger-nail like a twisted kernel of dried corn. Toward evening they broke their fast together, and Romney covered his face in his hands as he listened:
"My son, you are strong. Yesterday you wanted death, but knew too much to die in the midst of gray hate and red desire. All is well with you to-day. Your eyes hold the light that sees afar off. ”

“ Could it be that he, Romney, had hypnotised himself—so that the first possible woman had fallen straight into his heart? He had reached the period of life when a man begins consciously to look for his woman. Does not such a search make the man blind? One cannot see clearly so long as he doesn't want anything. Was he so shallow and common as to be caught in a whirlwind of the artificial? It was not that he lowered Anna Erivan in this thought, but could she be the one woman in the world for him? ”

“ It was the yellow of Moira Kelvin's rug—and this was a robe of a Chinese Holy Man. In India they would have called him a Sannysin.
Hastening forward, they saw that the head, lifted from time to time, was shaven and literally fallen in from emaciation. The gray of death suffused the brown skin, especially where it was thinnest, in lip and temple and nostril. The creature crawled; his age must have been very great, his grasp of life a miracle, yet the robe he wore was woven from the breasts of young camels and coloured, as the priests would say, with God's own light. ”

“ I have seen another side to the desert—nights like to-night when everything is softened in moonlight—the old civilisation—and all so clean. The Gobi is a mate of the moon's. I think it is almost as big as the moon. It starts the imagination because everything is finished. It has had its day, like the moon, and there is a wonderful story to be read if one could pass the aloofness. Even here in Nadiram we are but on the edge of its mystery. Hasn't the heart of the desert ever called to you? ”

“ Nifton Bend and the two Chinese leaders meant adventure; reinstatement into the world of real men; more than that they meant initiation into the deepest crafts of men.... Ti Kung had picked him up from the gutter of the world's darkest slum, placed him on his feet, trusted him with a matter of life and death, sent him on a journey to his masters. Minglapo was a figure to tie to; and as for the Hunchback, Romney had uncovered an emotion that startled himself. He knew now what it meant to love a leader—something of the old mystery of what it means to die for another. ”

“ Our marriage must be made in a better place than earth—or else we are very far apart and mad indeed. No man—none less than a saint, a master—could tell me when I am your wife—oh, yes, our Holy Man—but I would not wait for him. But don't you see—this is not the hour? Our hearts are broken. I feel Nadiram heavy upon me like a low and appraising eye. This place is full of the old. It belongs to the cries in the night—it belongs to him of the Forward Room.... Listen, to-night we must rest, or we will break to-morrow. I feel as if nothing mattered but strength for to-morrow. ”

“ The same calmness was Romney's now, and the realisation that he had passed through an episode that would ever increase in importance so long as he lived. He had been with the heart of new China when it ceased to beat; more than that, he had lost a man of his own heart and a woman who had shown him the way to power and glory.... From the first moment he had been drawn to the Hunchback—a kind of passion that seemed to awaken potentialities of his being, starting within strange premonitive urgings, that left him more and more dissatisfied with the smug and the small things of life. ”

“ Romney was less the mere crude male than most men. He had intuitions, visions, deep yearnings, answered to very little of the levelling dominance of the trade mind, but on the very points that he excelled, she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and she had come from all the earth. His thought of her to-day was not the thought of yesterday. It did not dawn upon him that her changes might not be moodiness or incoherence, but the very width of her orbit and splendour of her diffusion.
There was at Longstruth's a Chinese boy who served them. ”

“ Romney's sped forward to take it.
"I have lived in your devotion and it has been a holy thing, my son. You love well. She has become more than an earth-woman to you. She has become the way to God. It is the true yoga—this love of yours, when it is lifted from the lust of the flesh. Where there is love like yours, there is no lust. Without these trials you could not have known so soon the love you will bring in good time to her breast. The ways of easily-wedded pairs sink into commonness soon—the dull and dreamless death. ”

“ The faith of woman comes more quickly than the faith of man. She is one of the mothers of the new race. Her children cannot be borne alone among the little valley shrines of men. Her children must breathe the strong air of the hills."
"But tell me, shall I meet her again here—down on the good earth?"
"Your master cannot speak of that. If I should tell you what you ask, you could not turn your eyes upward from the dream of the valley-shrines.... Hold up your palms, my son. Master the red of flesh that will not let you wait in peace. ”

“ An Irish woman with an olive skin and dark hair and eyes—slender and not too tall. Her face in profile had the Greek essential of beauty, but with a hardly imaginable delicacy covering the rigour of that austere line of bone structure. She seemed the most conserved creature he had ever met, as if every excellence of life had been known to her from a child—all love and reverence and protection. ”

“ The face of the Hunchback was upturned to the bowed head of the woman. There was no sound, no movement. The leaves of an ancient mulberry tree lay tranced against the leaded window. The yellow rug was folded close. The lords of life and death were in that shadowed room.
An ironical smile came to Romney's lips as he turned the knob.... He was meeting the little world of men again. He must act. He must go on with his little part, after dwelling in the presence of those who were great enough to show the world their own immortal selves.... He must fight for his own life—what a travesty. ”

“ Her splendour was lifted now, her whole being crowned with the spirit that can only come to one whose quest has ended.... The Hunchback came toward them. The calm that Romney saw upon that face was marmoreal, the calm of one whose circle is almost finished. He led her to a chair which the yellow rug covered, and sat before her upon a cushion, his arm across her knees.
"You are young, but very old," he said. "You are a child, a girl, a woman all lavish in her love, but more than all a mother. This—this Romney—is like a son to us—and those brave young men—our sons. We are ancient, Moira. ”

“ Rajananda's hand was seldom raised above the rim of his basket during the hours of travel. Steadily Romney's wonder increased toward the old ascetic, his place and power. It was he at the last who had spoken regarding the mission; it was Rajananda to whom all the leaders and forces of the desert bowed in reverence and fealty. Rajananda concerned himself not only with the Peking business, the worship and well-being of the Gobi tribes, and the races of the world at large, but had time and authority for the direction of a white man's romance. ”

“ Romney's woman matters heretofore had been sundry and discursive.
She took his all and was not filled. No other pressure could be brought to bear upon a man to make him greater, to make him surpass himself, than an encounter with a woman who could contain him at his highest force, and still have an aching void to spare.
Moira Kelvin was thirty years old, in full bloom, trusting nothing under the sun but her own heart. Whether it was mania or the excellence of her evolution, her conviction remained upstanding that there was one man somewhere who could fully awaken her. ”

“ Romney said quietly.
Dr. Ti Kung turned to Nifton Bend who replied:
"We have thought of that. I can answer you best in my own experience. I was without a country—and dared to be a citizen of the world. It was this old Yellow Mother who took me in. China is not a nation. She is the bed-rock of Asia. All elements are in her breast—the most ancient, and conceptions so modern that they cannot be spoken aloud. For one must whisper the absolutely new. There is no place as yet for a visionary in America—but there is a place here. ”

“ From a white man's standpoint he had little to count on. His woman had been torn away by a desert-band—only the promise of a withered ancient creature whose next breath was less than a good gambling chance, yet Rajananda had bulked mightily in his heart. In his best moments he had faith—a priceless winning. From a white man's standpoint, he was on the longest possible chance, but only in the darker and more terrible passages could Romney accept this.... There was one moment of starlight, the last night of riding between Turgim and Nadiram, when he really had a great moment. ”

“ First to Nadiram," Rajananda intoned, "then the long road to Turgim, and the travel lines again to Tushi-kow and on to Peking.... You have breathed again, my son, and strength has come to you. You will set your face firm to the distance, knowing that the plan of life is for joy and for the evocation of divine spirit through the human heart. You shall know through nights and days that the woman you have found is in Sanctuary—that man goes alone upon his mission and that woman waits.
"... Listen, my son: in the elder days men put away their women to worship God. ”

“ Nifton Bend had been splendid about that.... Romney never ceased to wonder that three wise men in the desert had not agreed with him about the spy's death being an atrocity, or about the questionableness of the sacrifice of Japan for the greater good of Asia. Perhaps it was his own limitation, that he considered so strongly the personal side in all things. Perhaps a man impassioned with the glory of the future, who reckons not with the lives of his brothers, his enemies or himself in order to promote his dream of coming days into action, has the greater human heart. ”

“ It may have been only a waver, a gleam to her, so far, yet he felt that if he remained, Anna Erivan would know something of this that had come to him in an instant.... There was a kind of bruise in his heart that all his old life had been lessened. Suppose she was destined to be only a passing face to him. Would the old zeal for the world come back? Did he want back anything that had been spoiled? A woman great enough to diminish everything else, even for a night, was great enough for any man. But the things he had set himself to do.... Romney's lip tightened with self-scorn. ”

“ The Ancient was the cleanest of men. His bath each day was a desert rite, and, like all else that touched him, the food that he partook of was kept with holy care by his servant. There was not the faintest taint of senility about the old body. It was withered and dry but like sun-dried fruit. Romney often recalled the impression that Rajananda had made upon Anna Erivan when he first came to the court of the Consulate—the strength that had come to her from his passing. ”